Kaiser Health News: Effort To Reward Medicare Advantage Plans Draws CriticismKaiser Health News staff writer Julie Appleby reports: "Lake Wobegon has come to Medicare  and a key advisory panel doesn't like it. The panel, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac), in a Jan. 6 letter does not mention the fictional Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. But it hints that not every Medicare Advantage insurer deserves to be above average" (Appleby, 1/10).

Los Angeles Times: Supreme Court Ruling Hints Difficulty For Obama Insurance Law FoesThe Supreme Court may not be so anxious to rein in Congress' broad power to pass regulatory laws under the Constitution's commerce clause, the key point of dispute in the pending court battles over President Obama's health insurance law (Savage, 1/11).

The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog: Does Dissent In Body-Armor Case Bode Ill For Health-Care Law?Those reading the tea leaves on how the Supreme Court will judge the health-care overhaul may want to examine a dissent filed by two conservative justices this morning in a case involving the Constitution's Commerce Clause (Bravin, 1/10).

The Washington Post: Cleveland Clinic, MedStar Join Forces To Move Medical Technologies To MarketThe Cleveland Clinic, one of the country's most prominent medical research centers, and MedStar Health, the largest health-care provider in Maryland and the Washington region, will collaborate to bring medical inventions to market, according to a plan to be announced Tuesday (Sun, 1/10).

The Wall Street Journal: Abortion Rate Rises After A Long DeclineRachel Jones, senior research associate at Guttmacher, said the stalled decline may be tied to several factors, such as the fact that teenage-pregnancy rates appear to have stopped falling and the absence of any gains in contraceptive use in recent years. The recession may also have played a role, prompting people to think twice about the costs of raising a child, Dr. Jones said, though Guttmacher estimates that the abortion fall-off ended before the downturn started in 2007 (Mathews, 1/11).

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